The adventurer from Marquette, Mich., posted a video of herself on Facebook ski-stepping around the geographic South Pole. This accomplishment comes more than nine years after she became the first Michigan woman to reach the North Pole on skis.

Waara is a board member for the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame and Museum in Ishpeming, Michigan, and occasionally, but always enthusiastically, writes about skiing in the U.P. for my magazine, Silent Sports.

I was caught by surprise, however, to learn that she was filming a documentary in Antarctica. She instant messaged me via Facebook on Wednesday night.

Up popped the note, “Joel, I skied around the world yesterday and it’s only December 1. But really needed some start green wax.”

Frida Waara from the South Pole.

Although it was 8:34 p.m. on Dec. 1 here in east-central Wisconsin, I learned it was 3:34 p.m. on December 2 for her. “I’m 17 hours ahead of central,” Waara messaged.

She directed me to the short video on her Facebook page and to the blog at conditiononefilm.com where she and fellow filmmaker John Major were posting updates on their trip into a vast expanse of snow and ice, and temperatures of minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

Waara contacted me from the McMurdo Station, the furthest point south accessible by ship. It was a balmy 16 degrees at the logistics hub of the U.S. Antarctic Program, which she described as resembling “a gravel pit with people.”

She also noted, “The gloves we have been issued are really lousy but the boots and ‘Big Red’ parkas are the bomb!”

Waara explained that her passage was made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation. She had applied in 2008. She knew she was especially fortunate to have boarded an LC 130 Hercules, the largest aircraft fitted with ski wheels, for the flight from McMurdo to the Amundson-Scott Station at the South Pole.

“They only let you in when there’s room,” she messaged. “Some folks have worked here in McMurdo for YEARS and haven’t been to the pole yet.”

The same flight Waara took carried giant telescope components and cases of beer, no doubt of equal importance to researchers there.

“When you love snow, the places you can go,” Warra messaged.

She signed off her South Pole video saying the same thing, before name-checking some of the explorers who ventured there before her.

Waara said she met one of her heroines a few days earlier -- Anne Dal Vera who accompanied Ann Bancroft and two other women in 1993-94 on the first all women’s ski expedition to the South Pole. “Four women who put their footprint for the first time in history across this continent,” Waara wrote. “And it was just 100 years ago on December 14, 1911, that Roald Amundsen was the first to mark true south.”

Waara and her fellow filmmaker intend to break ground with their trip through the same snowy and frigid terrain. The working title of their film, Condition One, is a term used to describe the extreme weather condition in Antarctica.

According to their website, “Waara and Major will use their experiences in Antarctica to draw out students in interviews at schools in Detroit and Los Angeles, to talk about and contrast their fears, the hazards, and challenges in their urban surroundings, uncovering, in effect, their own Condition One while revealing the universality of the human spirit.”

The making of that compelling connection will have to wait until Waara returns home on December 23, concluding a long trip.

“The South Pole was the farthest I’ve ever traveled from home: 15,230 kilometers or 9,464 miles, and 12,420 miles from the North Pole, end to end on planet Earth,” she wrote.